Saturday, February 14, 2015

Amiri Baraka & his sick anti-Semitism

I had been looking forward to reading Claudia
Rankine’s most recent book of poetry, “Citizen,” having heard her read from and
discuss her work on NPR, but now, as I try to absorb her review of Amiri
Baraka’s ‘S O S’ (NY Times Book Review 2/15/15), a posthumous collection of Baraka's
work, I look forward to her poems less, if at all. I know that's my loss, there
clearly being, from my brief exposure to it, intelligence, depth and subtlety
to her work. My sense is these are poems we need. But all of that is challenged,
if not necessarily negated, by her uncritical applause for the works of Amiri
Baraka.

First, there's nothing she quotes in her
review of his posthumously published work that lives in the page, not a single
poem, nor a single line. For example: “We want a black poem. And a / Black
World. / Let the world be a Black Poem / And Let All Black People Speak This
Poem / Silently / or LOUD.” This may be a speech, even a rousing and arguably
necessary one, for the right audience at the right time, but it is awful, dead
on delivery, on the page.

Let me say that I've heard Amiri Baraka speak,
rage, and orate. I can attest to his fury and declamatory power, even though
his subject that time was Maoism and the need to adhere to Mao's doctrine of Cultural
Revolution, or else the Communist Party would devolve into a Fascist Party.

Uh huh.

Well, lots of us at one time or another may
have espoused radical — and in retrospect, radically stupid — political
ideas. I certainly did (details available on request). Baraka did without ever
making a public effort to digest and transcend what may have seemed so
ineluctable at the time. Mao and his Cultural Revolution. Mao and the Little
Red Book.

Baraka was revered too much and criticized too
little, from quarters where it might have made a difference, even to him, from
the likes, that is to say, of writers like Claudia Rankine.

Let me go back further and say I remember
Amiri Baraka as Leroi Jones — yes, I am that seasoned — and as an author of
plays that depicted racism and anti-racism in scenes and words that captured
the traumatic violence running wild in our country when the best were
assassinated with terrible consistency, riots were exploding in our cities, and
all the while we were dropping napalm on the Vietnamese. I honor that Leroi Jones
cum Amiri Baraka. I don't see that he improved as an artist when he turned from
strident nationalism — "Let the world be a Black Poem" — to dogmatic
Maoism. Those were terrible times and I'd like to suggest that his talent was
crushed by them.

But let me cut finally to what I find
absolutely unendurable about Rankin's review of Baraka. It's not just her salute
to inferior work, an insult, in the end, to her own. It is, finally, Baraka's
sick anti-Semitism.

Here's how Rankin discusses it, re: "The
controversial 'Somebody Blew Up America' — a poem that cost him New Jersey’s
poet laureate position when its speculations were described as anti-­Semitic .
. . "

"Described as anti-Semitic?" It
wasn't? In that hideous screed, Baraka said the Jews knew in advance about
9/11, as proven by the fact that all the Israelis high-tailed it before the
planes hit.

Rankin says of Baraka that in this and other
regards he took "an anti-Zionist position." When confronted with
flagrant nonsense of that sort I do tend to laugh out loud. Let me resist that
impulse long enough to declare that Baraka was going after Jews, then
apologizing for it, then doing it again, in ways that can't be reduced to or
explained by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is not anti-Zionism. It is
an addiction called Jew-hatred, the temptations of which Baraka could not finally
overcome.

Rankine then attempts to give Baraka's
anti-Semitism a literary provenance, when she notes that Paul Vangelisti,
editor of the collection, sees Baraka's views on this subject as descending
from Ezra Pound, as in: "No American poet since Pound has come closer to
making poetry and politics reciprocal forms of action".

This is meant to recommend Baraka? Pound's Jew
hatred led him to broadcast for Mussolini and to his being imprisoned post-War
for treason.

I hope that when I sit down with Claudia
Rankine's poems, as I still mean to, I find them superior to, and with no trace
of the apologia she penned, oh so dutifully, for Amiri Baraka.